Tuesday, November 18, 2008

19 November Is World Toilet Day

Did you know there's such a thing as a World Toilet Summit? At its most recent meeting in Macau, World Toilet Organisation founder Jack Sims said the concept of the flushing toilet was unsustainable.

Mr Sims said a culture where people flushed their loos but disregarded the thousands of litres of wasted drinking water each year was one of sanitation's greatest challenges.

"This 'flush and forget' attitude creates a new problem which we have to revisit," he said.

Toilet facts:

The average person spends three years of their life on the “john”. The average person flushes a toilet about 2500 times a year, while using about eight sheets of toilet paper per day. An estimated 2.6 billion people worldwide do not have access to proper toilet facilities, particularly in rural areas of China and India. Lack of suitable toilets and sanitation kills approximately 1.8 million people a year, many of them children. According to Jack Sims, a further 500 million toilets are needed to bridge the gap in sanitation. The first flushing toilet was invented in 1596 by Sir John Harrington, a British noble and godson to Queen Elizabeth I. He only invented one, as he was ridiculed by his peers, but he still used it for himself. Most toilets flush in the key of E flat. On average, a person will use 22 litres of drinkable water every day flushing a toilet.

Charles Sakai, aka "Bloodthirsty Warmonger"

Visit to Hawaii, 1988 (Pearl Harbor in background) This is a showcase and forum for my passions. The alias "Doc Adler" appears after each posting to bring attention to my other, psychological blog, "Up and Down Time" I plow through a large volume of news sources so that you don't have to.... We make no apologies for our unabashedly conservative bias, as our readers are looking for an antidote to the liberal bias of larger news outlets. We are almost unique in our commitment to cover not only politics and current events, but also the latest in toilet technology, and in championing the cause of homeless people and the mentally ill. To see my profile on Mormon.org, see http://mormon.org/me/2R75-eng/Charles